Web pioneer says double slash was unnecessary

Prosyn works hard all year round to decrypt and unravel the mysteries of IT for its clients but then certain things simply defy an explanation. Indeed, when industry gurus like Sir Tim Berners-Lee begin shrugging their shoulders, it becomes so much harder for us to claim that everything related to computing is scientific, logical and done for a reason!

The British physicist credited with inventing the worldwide web has been addressing one of its great unanswered questions. What exactly was the point of the double forward slash?

It's one of the great mysteries of the Internet. No, not the enormity of the concept itself or the exponential growth it has achieved in such a short space of time - but the origin of those two slashes that appear in every website address?

In an interview with the New York Times, Sir Tim Berners-Lee ruefully pondered the syntax he had used to help transform a private computer network into the Internet two decades ago and admitted that he may have done things differently today.

Modern browsers automatically insert the offending characters when a user types a website address beginning with 'www' but for many years the slashes had to be added manually. The slightest omission would result in a dreaded 'syntax error' page causing millions of users to curse this convention and question its purpose.

Speaking at a symposium on the future of technology, Sir Berners-Lee remarked: "Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //."

But despite the contribution of the infamous slashes to thousands of cases of repetitive strain injury and the ink that could have been saved on millions of company letterheads, these pointless characters have left no lasting stain on his reputation.

In the past ten years, Berners-Lee has been awarded an honorary degree from the Open University, a Doctor of Science from Lancaster University as well as a string of awards and honorary doctorates from around the world. He was named Greatest Briton of 2004 and received a knighthood from the Queen in the same year.

Indeed many have argued that Berners-Lee would have been awarded a Nobel Prize had his invention been rooted in traditional science.

So when Sir Tim first sat down to write the code which would shape all future generations, what exactly was his inspiration for this curious formula?

"It seemed like a good idea at the time." he said.